3 reasons why Doctor Strange could be Marvel’s coolest movie yet

This is a guest post authored by friend-of-Geek Chris Radtke. He’s a fan of Geek.com and loves the Marvel universe, and was kind enough to write this article.

Marvel’s feeling pretty tough these days. Guardians of the Galaxy was a big risk with its sassy raccoon (sasscoon) and talking tree. Behold! The gamble paid off. Not only is it the biggest movie of the summer, but fans boast it’s the best Marvel movie to date. Next year we’re getting another Guardians-level risk with Ant-Man, and Marvel announced they are placing a bet with a Doctor Strange movie slated for 2016.

For those of you geeks who don’t know Doctor Strange, he’s the best wizard in the world. It’s true. There can only be one Sorcerer Supreme of any realm, and Dr. Stephen Strange is the Sorcerer Supreme of Earth (there’s a Pizza Hut tie in here, somewhere). He’s so much cooler than Gandalf and Dumbledore (but not as cool as Vitruvious). He rocks a goatee instead of a hippy wizard beard, lives in an enchanted, hidden mansion in Greenwich Village, dates attractive supernatural girls from other dimensions, and wears a cloak like a man’s magic man — no robes allowed.

It might not seem possible, but the Doctor Strange movie could be Marvel’s coolest yet, and here’s why:

Marvel hired a horror movie director to helm

A guy named Scott Derrickson is directing Doctor Strange. He makes horror movies: The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Sinister, and Deliver Us From Evil to name a few. It’s a great idea. Doctor Strange deals with the occult, and having a guy who likes to make devil movies is a good omen.

Doctor Strange is an acid trip

The old Doctor Strange comics from the late ’60s were stoner sustenance. The artwork was trippy as hell — think melting skulls and Escher stairs. When talking to the press about Doctor Strange, Marvel Studios Head Cheese Kevin Feige has used the phrase “acid trip” a number of times. When talking about Doctor Strange traveling through other dimensions, he’s quoted as saying, “The very sort of crazy – [Steve] Ditko crazy acid trip way of traveling through dimensions and traveling through other realms is something that we think is very, very cool … playing with the perceptions of reality.”

Fiege later went on to talk about Neil Degrasse Tyson’s Cosmos and how it “…may as well be an acid trip. It is mind-bending and it’s all based on physics and in quantum mechanics. We’re going to play a lot with the notion of that as an explanation for how the sorcerers do what they do.” All this is just Feige-code for “you thought the other Marvel movies were awesome to see high? Wait till you see this.”

Joaquin Phoenix is rumored to play Doctor Strange

Doctor Strange says things like, “By the Seraphim’s silent chant and by Munnopor’s mystic moon, may omniscient Oshtur grant this fateful boon!” and “We are inside the moment between moments. We may even be able to affect what happens when the quantum possibilities collapse into one reality.” Joaquin Phoenix is the kind of actor who could pull off this level of lunacy with such conviction that everybody will understand that Strange is 100% the business.